A Drop of Night (17 page)

We collapse just inside the doors. I can't feel my legs. I can't feel
anything but pain, like a swarm of microscopic insects burrowing into my flesh.

“Hayden,” I mumble. Something bitter and chalky is coating my tongue. “Hayden?”

There's no way it's him. I saw him die
.

I'm looking along the floor at the others. My vision is blurry, all flickering shadows and sudden, poisonous bursts of color when someone moves.

I see Lilly and Jules. They're scratching between their fingers, spitting on them, tears streaming down their faces. At least they
have
fingers. Will is next to them. His right hand is half gone, three of his digits burned to nubs. He's hunched over, eyes closed, teeth gritted.

I try to sit up. I feel my cheek knock against the floor, and I realize my sitting-up attempt has failed. I
have absolutely no sense of balance. The chandeliers are out, replaced by a murky green glow. Emergency lighting. Dorf's voice is droning somewhere in the distance. Muffled. Thumping.

And Hayden's still here. He hasn't turned into a hallucination and disappeared. He's kneeling next to Will, trying to pry his arm away from his chest.

I get myself into a semi-upright position. Immediately I feel like I'm going to vomit. My skin is stiff and dry, like the outside layer has hardened into a shell. My legs are still attached. That's cool. They feel like deadweights, prickly stumps, but at least they're there.

I rub the side of my face. Flakes of skin come off on my fingertips. A tuft of hair.

“Hayden,” I rasp, and I sound like a wicked witch, a million years old. “I saw them kill you.”

Hayden turns. His face flickers oddly in the shadows and the green light. He leaves Will. I catch a whiff of him as he approaches.
Oh, gross
. He smells rank. Worse than us, and I doubt we smell like roses, either, after this many hours down here. It's a blood smell, but also dirt and damp, sweaty clothes, and something dark, hot, tarry.

“Yeah, well, I
felt
them kill me. Stop scratching; you'll
spread the poison. Wave your arms to get the particles off and don't put your fingers near your mouth.”

I stare at him. Blink. Behind my eyelids I see:
Hayden, lying on the floor of the cube room. Miss Sei, trailing a thumb along his brow. The nozzle driving in—

“How do you know?” I ask quietly. “What happened to you?”

He ignores me, gives my ear a cursory inspection, and apparently doesn't deem it problematic because he's heading over to Jules and Lilly now. “We can't stay here,” he says over his shoulder. “This room isn't rigged, but there're some traps between here and where we need to be.”

“Oh, and where do we need to be, Hayden?” I say, spiteful, because if he's a hallucination he's a stupid know-it-all one. I wave my arms anyway, sitting on the ground and swinging them in circles like some sort of demented flightless bird.

“I found a panic room,” Hayden says. “About six rooms that way.” He jabs a finger toward a door in what I think is the western wall.

I drop my arms. “A panic room?”

Someone, I think Jules, mumbles, “I thought this whole palace was their panic room.”

I drag myself to my feet. The painful swarming feeling is subsiding, dulling to a prickly, sandpapery itch. “Show me your neck,” I say.

“Anouk, we don't have time—”

I stagger toward him and grab at his arm.
“Show me.”

Hayden stares at me. I think I see disdain somewhere under all that grime, and I wonder if he's going to throw me across the room. I don't let go of his arm. He rips free and turns, dropping his chin to his chest.

The wound on the back of his neck is raw. Deep. It looks like he tried to clean it—the edges have been wiped—but it's still exposed, a glimmering dark-red hole driving right into his spinal column.

“Happy?” he says, facing me again. “Look, I want explanations as much as anyone, but right now we need to move.” His voice explodes. “Get up, people!”

I want to barf again. I bend over, gasping. “I saw you die, Hayden. I saw you stop breathing, how are you—”
Alive? Anouk, what is your problem? He didn't die. He's standing right in front of you. This is a good thing!

“Anouk?” Lilly manages.

I go to her and help her up. We totter a few steps over to Jules. Hayden hoists Will up, and the three of us
follow them, half jogging, half dragging each other into a bedroom.

The chandeliers are off here, too, the furnishings just spiny shapes in the gloom. I really need some water. We get to a bathroom, the scallop-shaped marble tub in the center straight out of Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
. It's dry as a bone.

In the next room, even the emergency lighting is gone. It's pitch-black. And now a flashlight clicks on, a searing white beam.

“Move it,” Hayden says, gesturing us forward. He sweeps the light over the wall. Stops it on a point low to the ground. He ducks down. I see a panel clicking out, sliding to the side on invisible tracks. Behind it is a square metal hatch. He jerks it open.

“In here.”

Seriously?
Hansel and Gretel
, the tatty old paperback, upside down on the couch in the playroom:
“Creep inside,” said the wicked witch. “And see if the oven is hot enough.”

“What's in there?” I ask, but Lilly is already pushing Will through, and Jules is following. I watch them go, look to Hayden holding the hatch open.

“Idiot, it's the panic room!” he says, and his eyes are wide, scared. “Get in!”

I hear Jules's voice, tinny, somewhere inside the wall: “Anouk, come on!”

I drop onto all fours and crawl through the hatch. Stale, metallic air envelopes me. The panic room is tube shaped, a gray metal capsule like a storm shelter. Six feet wide, five feet high. Maybe fifteen feet long. A strip of dim, flickering light runs along the ceiling, barely illuminating the space. An unmade bunk folds out of one wall. Sleek plastic containers fill a shelf on the other.

I'm thinking:
Who built this panic room and what exactly is it for
? And now I hear
Dorf's voice outside, sharp, so loud it sounds like he's standing a foot away. “Anouk. Will. Jules. Lilly. I hope you're doing well—”

Hayden clangs the hatch shut.

The light buzzes
.

The only other sound is our breathing, fast, getting slower. Slower—

Will lets out a muffled groan. I snap out of it. Push past Jules and start scooting along the shelves, picking up boxes, clicking them open and upending them.

“How did you survive?” I snap at Hayden. I wriggle around him. The capsule is way too tight. The light is so weak, barely enough to see by, and the shadows in the corners are pitch-black.

Hayden makes an angry noise and dives after me, grabbing at scissors, a reflective blanket, a bunch of little bottles that go rolling and bouncing off the shelf.

I find a box with a Red Cross symbol on it and rip it open. Bandages. A syringe. Penicillin
.
A round tin of salve—blue label with a blocky, '70s font on it, even
though it looks brand-new.
For burns and swelling
.

I grab it. Go over to Will. Lilly and Jules are on their knees next to him, making futile attempts to comfort him. I start dabbing some of the gray goop onto a cotton swab. “This'll probably hurt, but it should help.” I hand the swab to Lilly. Look back over my shoulder at Hayden. “Hayden, talk. What happened?”

Hayden leans back against the end of the capsule and crosses his arms over his chest. His blue eyes are flinty. This was clearly not how he envisioned his heroic rescue efforts turning out. We're hijacking his space. And I realize now that we don't really know Hayden. At all.

“No idea,” Hayden says. “Last thing I remember is you having a hissy fit in the dining room. When I woke up, I was lying on the floor of this really huge hall, and I had a hole in my neck.”

“What, they just dumped you?”

“Who?”

“Miss Sei. The trackers.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” He glowers at me, like I just insulted him. Lilly is daubing the salve onto Will's wounds. Will has his teeth clenched, and Lilly flinches every time he sucks his
breath in. Jules is sitting really still, looking dazed.

Hayden uncrosses his arms and squats. “I walked around. Kind of guessed I must be underground in the Palais du Papillon
,
since I saw the butterfly coat of arms everywhere. I assumed there had been an accident and it knocked out my short-term memory.”

“So you don't know why we're here,” Lilly says. “You don't know what's going on.”

“Not a clue.”

I squint at him. He's definitely jittery. Thinner. I can see his clavicles jutting through his shirt. And there's a twitch in one of his eyes, a constant blink.

“How did you find us?” I ask.

“Dumb luck,” Hayden says. “I'd been hearing the messages from Dorf for a few hours, but I could never make them out. So I decided to head in the direction they were coming from. Then I heard you screaming.”

“I don't think I screamed,” I say, still sorting through the supplies, making a heap of the things I think might come in handy. “And why did you have rope with you? You just happened to be toting curtain ropes with you because that's the fashionable accessory for traversing underground palaces?”

Hayden throws up his hands. “What do you want, an admission of guilt? You're welcome, I saved you!”

He stares at me, his eye still twitching, arms crossed like a pouty kid having a bad birthday party.

I look down at Will. Hand Lilly another cotton swab. “Sorry,” I say. I shouldn't be the one apologizing—suspicion is kind of necessary at this point—but someone has to, or we're not going to get anywhere. I scoot back to the first-aid kit. “We've seen a lot of bizarre stuff and we're paranoid. I'm sorry, Hayden.”

He's still staring at me reproachfully. Now he's grabbing some clear plastic bottles from the shelf and filling them with water from a spigot in the wall.

“Forget it.” He screws the top onto one of the bottles. “I heard someone screaming and I came running. I tore the ropes off that four-poster we passed. You can check if you want. Otherwise I would have gotten there faster.” He tosses the bottle to me. I want to guzzle it down—my tongue feels like it's going to crack—but I stoop and hold it for Will while he drinks.

“Now you tell me something.” Hayden's eyes dart between Will and me. “What have you found out?”

“Not much,” I say. Will stops drinking. I empty the
rest of the bottle in three gulps. “We think the people who kidnapped us are a centuries-old, weapons-dealing, art-stealing crime family. We also think they're not in complete control of what goes on down here. They keep talking about a rogue party, and it's like it's toying with us, and toying with the Sapanis, too, and they're in some kind of unhealthy symbiosis with each other.” I pause, thinking. “The transmissions were only for us. That means either Dorf thinks you're dead, or he's deliberately leaving you out of the equation. Have you seen anyone down here? Like, for example, a creepy pale guy bleeding all over the place or a dripping Frenchwoman?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Have you seen anyone?”

“I saw some guys in black gear run past once. I hid behind a table, thought I was done for. They didn't see me. They didn't even look anywhere but straight ahead. I haven't seen anyone since. They haven't come back.”

“That's because they're dead. They were probably trackers. Something killed a bunch outside the room we were hiding in.”

“
Something
killed them? What's that supposed to mean?”

“Or someone. The rogue party. Perdu was talking about an
homme papillon.
”

Hayden glances up at me. “Who's Perdu?”

“The creepy pale guy.”

Hayden cackles. Full-on throws back his head and natters like a chainsaw. I think of the wound on the back of his neck, squeezing open. Wince.

“What kind of name is
Perdu
?” Hayden says. His eyes are bright, almost fevered.

“He said he was lost and we needed to call him something,” I snap. “Perdu equals ‘lost' in French. So we called him Perdu. Shut up.”

“Right,” Hayden says. He returns to bottle filling, but he's shaking his head. “So where's Perdu now?”

I look at the others for help.

“He left,” Lilly says quietly.

Hayden glances between us, trying to figure out what's going on. “Well, did you talk to him? Did you figure out what he was doing down here? Gah, you could have had all of this figured out by now!”

“We did talk to him,” Jules says. It's the first time he's said anything to Hayden, and he sounds annoyed. “He said there was a secret exit due north. He also thought
he was born in 1772, and when we were hiding from the trackers he unlocked the doors on us while we were sleeping.” Jules giggles, a surreal sound, not even remotely happy. “Something got him.”

“There's that word again. Something.
Something
got him.”

“Yes, Hayden,
something
got him,” I say, turning away. I go back to picking through the shelves. “There was blood all over the floor. Pieces of— Look, that's what animals do, okay? Not people.”

I find a flashlight. Two more flashlights. Four chunky black batteries.

“You said he was a creepy pale guy bleeding everywhere. Was he hurt when you found him?”

“Yeah.”

“So who says there
was
anyone else? Who says he didn't open those doors and kill all the trackers himself?”

“Because of a lot of reasons. We think they were killed right after we hid in there. Perdu was
hurt.
He was terrified—”

“Or he was a really good liar.” Hayden finishes filling another bottle and throws it hard and fast to Lilly. She catches it. Barely.

“He could have been hit by a trap room.”

I glare at him. “You weren't there, Hayden. You don't—”

“On second thought, maybe I do know something you don't,” he interrupts. “We're on the eastern edge of the palace. There's only one route that heads north from here: that hall that's now filled with poisonous blue fumes. We'd have to backtrack through trap rooms and head west at least a thousand feet before we get to the next gallery heading north. If the exit
is
that way, and you're claiming it is, we can go now, look for another route, and risk capture. Or we can do something they won't expect. We stay here and go through the rigged hall.”

“And you have five hazmat suits where exactly?”

“We won't need hazmat suits. I passed another trap room a while back. Same type of blue poison gas. Something had activated it, fumes all over the place. When I ran past four hours later, it was clear. No fumes. I could walk right into it, totally safe. If we assume it was activated within two hours of me first passing it, that means at some point after the six-hour mark, there's a window of safety where the fumes have cleared and the trap room hasn't reset itself yet. Here's what I'm
suggesting: we lie low. Wait for that hall to clear. Then in six hours we haul out of here and make a run for it.”

“A run for what?”

“The exit, Nancy Drew.”

“That's a lot of assumptions. We tried waiting before. It didn't end well. Also, we won't be moving. They might think we're all dead.”

“Good.”

I stare at him. I still can't believe he's real. He's right here, skin slick, unhealthy looking, in the wan light of the ceiling. Eye twitching. That bloody smear on his neck.

He crawls over with the last of the bottles and hands one to me, and I reach out and touch his wrist just below the sleeve of his sweatshirt. That would have been weird a few days ago, but nothing seems that weird anymore. I feel his skin, slightly greasy and clammy, but warm. Alive.

He jerks away. “It's me, Anouk,” he says, right eye going
twitch-twitch
like a camera lens. “I'm not dead.”